"Are you sure you're ready?" Mum asks, waiting as I take a deep breath to calm my nerves. Before I reply, I can't help but look at the girl looking at me in the mirror, a girl wearing a grey school uniform, complete with a white blouse, a smart blazer and tie, a grey knee-length pleated skirt, thick grey tights and plain black flats.

Cassidy's life has been lonely and full of heartache. Abandoned as an infant, bounced from foster home to foster home. He's never found a place where he's belonged. Then one summer as his life starts to turn around, something happens that changes everything...

The young maiden sat between her parents as they traveled to a foreign place. She was kept in the dark of their destination. It was only the three of them, as the young lord of her dream has become a disparaging memory. He was to stand beside her…to defend her against the unjust; to fight for her honor and to stay united against the dark foe. Alas, the dark foes were their own families and he bowed in defeat to his father than to renounce his name.

The girls came round later that afternoon, it was my turn to have them. Now don’t get me wrong I love my daughters, and I really enjoy our Sunday activities, but I do find the three hour Saturday afternoon Monopoly sessions rather dull. This week was different. The girls had a new set. New to them anyway.

“Vengeance, retaliation, retribution, revenge are deceitful brothers—vile, beguiling demons promising justifiable compensation to a pained soul for his losses. Yet in truth they craftily fester away all else of worth remaining.”
― Richelle E. Goodrich, The Tarishe Curse

Jessica Harkness had knowingly said, “It was to be expected. An old maid’s last desperate fling. She’ll settle down to a couple of cats and a bitter looking expression permanently glued on her face in a few years, like Felicity Herbert. Nothing surer. Seen it all before I have, Alice. Lord knows what she’ll do when Miss Sophie marries Clara’s boy, for she can’t look after the place. It’s Miss Sophie that does all the woman’s work and no one will send a man round to help Miss Abi, it’s so sour and unpleasant as she is. A fool to herself that one’s been. She should have had half a dozen children by now, but I guess she couldn’t even be pleasant enough to a man to get him into and keep him in her bed. And Lord knows that’s not a difficult thing to do. A well fed and well bed man is like milk loaf dough in even a plain woman’s hands, and plain she is not. And besides it’s no chore, for a woman does need to be kept comfortable or in child so she can go about her work undistracted.”

“Come on Covern, why did you kill that woman that worked for the agency?” Tizzy was leaning over him, trying to get him to talk.
Her partner was standing nearby, just in case she got out of hand. He knew how Tizzy loves to use force to get her answers.

“Maybe he doesn’t talk unless he has a dildo shove up his ass?” Keith walks around him.

Covern was strapped into a metal chair in the interrogation room. There wasn’t any window or furniture in the room. He looks at both police officers and just smile at them.